A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated high-speed network for interconnecting and presenting a shared pool of storage devices to multiple servers. SAN is primarily used to enhance performance of the storage devices as they appear as a single locally attached device to the servers, where the servers are centrally managed. Virtual Storage Area Network (VSAN) is a logical partition in the SAN. The VSAN allows data traffic of the servers to be isolated within specific portions of SAN so that system of storage devices is scaled out and is easy to configure. The main objective of the VSAN is the easy management of subscribers which can be added or relocated without the need for changing the physical layout of storage. Another objective of the VSAN is to provide data redundancy which minimizes the risk of data loss.
A conventional VSAN storage array includes a brick as a basic building block. The brick of the VSAN architecture comprises two storage controllers for receiving Input/Output (I/O) request from host machines connected to the bricks. The brick further comprises a Disk Array Enclosure (DAE) for holding multiple Solid State Drives (SSD) for storing data, and backup units. Each storage controller has multi-core Central Processing Units (CPUs) for processing I/O tasks. In the conventional architecture of VSAN, the bricks may be clustered together to increase performance and capacity of the system. A cluster in VSAN may include two or more bricks. When storage space in a brick of the cluster is utilized up to a threshold, an alert is sent to a user to scale out the system by including additional bricks in the system. For example, the threshold may be 90% of total storage available in the brick. Thus, the user has to manually instruct the system for including additional bricks in the system. Also, inclusion of additional bricks in the system may cost substantial amount of money. Additionally, if the threshold is reached, a new I/O request has to wait in a process queue to be processed, hence increasing latency to process the request.
Furthermore, the existing VSAN architecture only alerts the user, and does not provide automatic inclusion of bricks to the VSAN network, i.e. in the existing architecture, there does not exist a mechanism to route the data to different a secondary data storage unit when primary data storage unit is overloaded. Therefore, the bricks of the VSAN network is not fully utilized. Also, in the conventional VSAN architecture, an I/O request cannot be passed to different bricks of the VSAN. Thus, processing load of a brick is not efficiently managed.
The information disclosed in this background of the disclosure section is only for enhancement of understanding of the general background of the invention and should not be taken as an acknowledgement or any form of suggestion that this information forms the prior art already known to a person skilled in the art.